Superachievers and Serotonin

This post really isn't about singing.  It's about me, my partner, our relationship, and the choices I made long ago that seem so at odds with the priorities of the younger generation (I mean the "older" younger generation; women who are now between the ages of 35 and 45).

I addressed some of it here.

This weekend, I had a mini-showdown with my partner.  I was very proud of myself because I didn't lose my temper, which was one of my New Year's resolutions.  I did, however, say something that she found very hurtful.  I don't regret it, because I didn't say it to be hurtful; I said it because it is true and needed to be said.

Several months ago, I finally was able to unravel an emotional mystery that had had me stumped for almost four decades; namely, how could my partner and I love each other so much and yet have so many ugly screaming fights?  What I realized, was that although we had been many things to each other -  lovers, sweethearts, cuddles, mutual children, mutual mommies, and, more recently, caregiver and patient - I don't think that we had ever been friends.

Over the weekend, for the umpteenth time, she tried to shut me up when I was talking about how I was feeling.  Not about anything "loaded" that had to do with "us", just something I was feeling, which I felt entitled to mention as she had just mentioned a situation in which she had had feelings that I perceived to be similar.

So I said to her, more or less what I have written here.  That although I loved her, we were not friends.  I also said that everything that was wrong with our relationship, even though we have adored each other in one sense or another for almost 40 years, is that our relationship started out as a romance, not a friendship, so that secure base was never there.  Yes, of course we have interests in common, not just an aesthetic attraction to each other (which runs much deeper than just a sexual attraction), but we can't seem to talk, about anything in a comfortable relaxed way.  Or when we do, it's a pleasant surprise.  Then she got into a "state" about how I had hurt her feelings, so I said "I am proud of myself that I didn't lose my temper.  But what I said is true.  And in fact, another problem with our relationship  is that there are just too many emotions in it, good and bad."

Although it seems a stretch, there is a throughline between that interchange, that knowledge, and the flawed basis for our relationship (not that it is necessarily a more flawed relationship that many others, just that it never had a secure base) and all of my envy of this bevy of superachievers, mostly women born after 1970, that I feel subsumed by and diminished by.

When I was growing up, the most important thing for a girl (or young woman) to have was a boyfriend/lover/fiance, or whatever.  In my case, because I have always been a girly girl who nonethless seemed to prefer women, it was a butch-beau.  Part and parcel of that was not just sex and lust (acted out or not), but sturm and drang.  I would say that between the ages of 14 and 30, whether I was drunk or sober, "virgin" or sexually active, probably 75% of my emotional energy went into the vagaries of whatever relationship I was involved in.  And that was true of most of my female friends as well, Lesbian or straight.  School was something to be suffered through, for the most part.  Most of us planned to go to college, but in New York, with a certain GPA and SAT score, you could go to one of the City Colleges, no questions asked.  There was not this mad scramble to add things (school orchestra or newspaper, volunteer work, or advanced placement immersion classes) to a college admissions resume,  and really no one thought about "careers".  Being a teacher was about it.  Or if not a teacher, some kind of secretary or administrative assistant in an "interesting" industry until, well, what, we got married?  Even if we didn't plan to get married, we didn't plan all that much else, really.

This new breed of women are completely different.  First of all, they were the first generation to transition from adolescence to adulthood with certain feminist assumptions in place.  They wanted to be doctors, lawyers, MBAs.  They probably had as much sex (or as little) as the women of my generation but the vocabulary of limerence played very little role in their interactions, thoughts, or fantasies.  Hence their emotions were not constantly engaged.  And when they got older, situated in these careers (or ones they designed themselves, which required several additional decades of formal or informal schooling - on whose money?) it was much of the same.  They married a "partner" not a "lover" and certainly not anyone who kept them on the kind of emotional roller coaster that, for women of my generation, was in some ways the whole point of relationships to begin with.

In Sundays' TIMES, there was this article. One thing I will say about myself, is that I would prefer to withstand a fair amount of physical and mental discomfort rather than "take something".  (I am not talking about symptoms that might be life threatening - for example I take blood pressure medicine.)  And I am very very grateful that my therapist has never offered me any psychotropic medication, even when I am down in the dumps or distraught.  (She - and an online quiz - have assured me that I am not depressed in the clinical sense.)

But after reading the article, I started wondering: are all these superachievers medicated to stay "perky", energetic, ambitious, and, well, "strictly business, nothing personal", not just in how they handle high power careers, but how this carries over into the kinds of relationships they choose or don't choose?  It's the right demographic. Women who are approaching or in prime middle age. The article said that one out of four women in this age group are taking something. (Actually it included the age group that is slightly older as well, but I see these behaviors more in women born after 1970).

I mean this is not a new concern. this seems to have been around for quite some time.

Hmmm....

A Learning Experience

I am home from having had a lovely Thanksgiving meal in a Spanish restaurant with my partner (it is also our 35th anniversary, give or take a few rocky years). In addition to the leftovers from the restaurant, I had made a dish of sweet potatoes and apples (she had served it to me that first Thanksgiving and taught me how to make it) and we bought a pumpkin pie. She is extremely thin and eats very little, and I am a medium size (could lose 5-10 pounds but am not into that right now) and while I certainly eat more than an anorexic model (or than my partner does), in no way can I finish a "serving" of food from a 21st Century restaurant.

So we had enough food to give a mini Thanksgiving meal to my partner's downstairs neighbor who is even older, thinner, sicker, and possibly poorer than my partner, and had not been able to go out.

This made me feel good.

Getting to the topic of this post, over the past few days I had a very bad experience with my pseudonymous blog, which I may be beginning to outgrow.

That is where I began to write about singing and about all the emotional turmoil I was experiencing post-Valentine's Day 2004 (which you can read about here).

It was there that I met "real" singers for the first time. In the past I had only personally known the sort of amateurs who sang with me in "the opera underground" or had read about singers from the Met. I enjoyed my time singing with those amateur groups and if I compared myself to anyone, it was to the women there who were singing the roles I was singing, or to an objective standard of what I thought the music should sound like, or to recordings.

When I began singing again in 2004, pre-blogging, I was living in a bubble. There was The Mentor, who was an exacting task master, often reducing me to tears, but I was not comparing myself to anyone (because the only singers I knew were the one other trained and the 5 or 6 untrained, singers in that small choir), or my life to anyone's except his, of course, and in retrospect I can see that for all the anguish, he was probably one of the 3 or 4 greatest influences on my life, from my singing to my choice of sheets and towels.

Once I began my involvement with the pseudonymous blogging community, I met singers who, while not big stars, were singing all over the country and beyond (some were expats living in Europe). I learned some things about singing both from them and from various online singers' forums, for which I am grateful. I learned about vocal technique, about repertoire, about interpretation. I also heard more than I wanted to know about some of the more "glamorous" aspects of being a singer (as distinct from learning about singing). I don't think that this did much to enhance my life (or improve my singing or inform my choice of church solos or arias) and did a lot toward making me dissatisfied with myself.

As a result of this latter, I seem to have ended up making enemies of all these people and they have "unfriended" me (or I them) from the community in question.

After feeling angry and embarrassed (not by the "unfriendings" but by some of the things that were said to me - or rather written) I decided that all of this was really a blessing in disguise and that it was time to reevaluate my relationship with other singers.

As I am probably only going to be singing either church solos or in various operatic concerts I produce myself, my only relationship with other singers should either be as colleagues (i.e., people who might be interested in participating in some of these things with me or whom I might ask for advice about what to sing - although the first person I should ask about that should be my teacher), or as real mentors, either direct (like my teacher) or indirect, like the renowned teachers and coaches who have blogs with many bits of wisdom about everything from vocal technique to attitude.

Or I need to talk to peers. I so far have found one, a woman who stumbled upon this blog, who started serious classical singing in her late 40s, and who has many of the same daily concerns that I do (mostly about church repertoire).

And of course I am always happy to talk to my colleagues in the choir, some who have vocal training, and some who don't, but who for the most part are supportive and appreciative of what I have to offer.

So what I'm saying is, I think it is a positive thing that I have now been forced to let go of some of the voyeurism that was making me unhappy. It wasn't helping me sing better, or feel better about my life.

ETA: I just deleted that pseudonymous blog, which I had been writing for about six years. I consider that to have been a much needed form of "cleaning house".